Waking the Sleeping Giant

Abstract

A Brief History of Healthcare IT I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.-Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Tora! Tora! Tora! It was 1996, and I had my first job in the IT world. The floppy disk drives I knew in my youth were disappearing, desktop productivity tools were powerful and easy to use, and the World Wide Web was making its way into households across the world. The Problem with Paper One thing I noticed soon after arriving at my new job was a process for data sharing that was problematic. Every morning at about 10 o'clock, an employee in the communications office would emerge in the copy room with a pile of hand-snipped news clippings, which would be assembled and photocopied to form a thick stack of news that was relevant to the industry in which we worked. This bundle of trade news was then reproduced countless times, stapled, and delivered by the mailroom to division directors and executives for midday perusing.